Creative strategy: What is it, and how to play nice with marketing so you can do more of it

I don’t know why this is true, but if you put ten copywriters in a room with ten marketing managers, half will be wordsmithing copy and the other half will be timelining the product launch -- and it’s never the half you’d expect. There’s a strange bleedover that happens between marketing and advertising, or maybe it’s an irresistible siren call from one side to the other, that makes experts in one field decide they’d rather do the other expert’s job.

Because we all tend to play in the same sandbox, it’s worth the minor effort it takes to draw out a few lines differentiating where marketing strategy ends and creative strategy picks up.

Marketing: The “who, what, why”

First of all: caveat. I’m not a marketer. I don’t even pretend to be. All I know is that my favorite clients are the ones who not only have the great plans, they’ve also taken the time to think them through. That doesn’t mean you’ve come up with a snazzy tagline and color scheme for the banner ad. It means you’ve thought about who your audience is, what kinds of things matter to them, and why your product or service fills a need for these folks. That kind of information is like gold.

Before I can start writing any sort of promotional copy, there are some fundamental questions I need my friends in marketing to answer:

• Who are we talking to? (audience/demographic information)
• What is the most important messaging point to convey to the audience?
• Why will the audience care?
• What is the call to action -- and what will compel them to act?

 Creative: The “how”

Those questions are like loaded ammunition for the next step in the process, developing the creative strategy. If marketing is essentially asking, “What do we want to say to these people?” then creative should be asking, “How should we say it?”

The “how” is only one question but it’s like a mother duck that always has a trail of loudly squawking babies following along behind. These follow-ups are what help shape the content. How asks:

• In what tone of voice? Humorous or strictly professional? Peer-to-peer? Conversational?
• How aggressive is the sales pitch?
• What is the format of the message? Online or print or multimedia? Is it part of a campaign?
• What should the message look/sound/feel like?
• How do you want people to react emotionally to the message?

If these questions look familiar, it’s because you've seen them before in a creative brief. Those things matter.

There’s no way to develop a good creative strategy without marketing input, and a marketing strategy that tries to be all-inclusive of marketing and creative will never be as powerful as it could have been. That’s why it’s absolutely essential to have a climate of collaboration and mutual respect between the marketing and creative teams, so that experts from both sides can bring insights and ideas to the table, as opposed to throwing information and concepts over the wall.

The more you throw over, the higher the wall seems to get. Am I right? It’s weird how that works.